On stony ground: Lithic technology, human evolution, and the emergence of culture

Culture is the central concept of anthropology. Its centrality comes from the fact that all branches of the discipline use it, that it is in a way a shorthand for what makes humans unique, and therefore defines anthropology as a separate discipline. In recent years the major contributions to an evolutionary approach to culture have come either from primatologists mapping the range of behaviors, among chimpanzees in particular, that can be referred to as cultural or protocultural(1,2) or from evolutionary theorists who have developed models to account for the pattern and process of human cultural diversification and its impact on human adaptation.(3-5)